Rethinking the Great Recession

In embracing a victims-and-villains explanation of the recession, Americans are missing important lessons about the future of the U.S. economy.The story has been all about crime and punishment when it should have been about boom and bust. People were conditioned by a quarter-century of good economic times to believe that we had moved into a new era of reliable economic growth. Homeowners, investors, bankers, and economists all suspended disbelief. Their heady assumptions fostered a get-rich-quick climate in which wishful thinking, exploitation, and illegality flourished.